Long Read: A Friend Looks At John Eastman

I have a personal beef with John Eastman, since he has a house in Santa Fe and had his phone taken away by law enforcement, all in my part of town. But beyond that, it’s fascinating to look in detail at Trump’s toadies and Federalist Society grifters to see their motivations.

This article doesn’t give the full story – we won’t see that for decades, perhaps never if we don’t get these lawbreakers into prison as soon as possible. But it has some clues. It’s possible that the answer will simply be that they wanted power any way they could get it and didn’t think out the consequences, as Elon Musk shows us every day.

Some selections:

On December 9, 2021, in a deposition taken by the staff of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Eastman invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 100 times. He invoked the Fifth again in an appearance in front of a Georgia grand jury investigating the Trump team’s efforts to pressure Georgia authorities into reversing the result in that state and awarding its electors to Trump.

I reached out to Eastman for an interview, and to my surprise, he accepted gladly. When we spoke on the phone, he was exactly as I remembered—charming, voluble, seemingly candid, eager to engage in debates over legal theory. There was no hint that I was talking to a man brought to bay by some very powerful forces and facing the full shaming power of the Twitterverse; indeed, the conversation was more like a skull session one might have with a colleague in the faculty lounge. In no way did he admit, or seem to feel, that he had done anything wrong, or, except in the most general way, fire back against his accusers.

In only his second year as a professor, Eastman became part of the Republican effort to stop recounts in Florida after the 2000 election and guarantee the White House to George W. Bush. 

But it’s certainly possible that Eastman’s creation of a new birther-style meme [in an op-ed in Newsweek] found favor with America’s foremost birther, Donald Trump. Trump had burst into national politics with his single-minded embrace of the claim that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya; during the 2016 campaign he loudly proclaimed that children of the undocumented should not be citizens—and, in fact, not just of the undocumented.

This brings us to the core of the case against Eastman, as laid out in the January 6th Committee report, best expressed in the two famous “coup” memos he wrote in late 2020 and early 2021 outlining a scheme by which Vice President Mike Pence could reject electoral votes from states that the Trump campaign believed Trump should have carried and thus somehow must have carried. As a legal scholar, I have spent considerable time with those memos; they are fascinating documents, and they reveal the Trump theory to have been so flimsy that it is difficult to believe that any serious person took them seriously. 

Read the whole thing.